In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington tells of being awakened every morning in the slave quarters long before daylight by an old rooster crowing. The sound of the crowing rooster was the sign for the slaves to hit the floor and move out to the field to begin a day of hard work. According to Washington, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and the slaves realized they had been freed, something changed in the Washington shanty. He recalls awakening the morning afterwards not to the sound of a rooster crowing, but his mother chasing that rooster around the barnyard with an axe. According to Mr. Washington, the Emancipation Proclamation was hard on roosters all across the South. That day the Booker T. Washington family fried and ate their al…